


No Perfect Place

by Relia



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Depression, Dysfunctional Family, M/M, Mild BDSM, Modern Era, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-19 07:35:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29871315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Relia/pseuds/Relia
Summary: The thing about a shitty family, the really annoying thing, is that having one really takes it out of you.  Dionysus hates that.
Relationships: Dionysus/Hypnos (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 56





	No Perfect Place

The thing about a shitty family, the really annoying thing, is that having one really takes it out of you. Dionysus hates that.

Evidence: On a bad day, there’s no point in trying to even make the bed when Hypnos is just going to be in it all day. It’s one of those things you learn to give up on; either you’re spending all day shepherding him through every possible basic task, or you’re taking the practical route and leaving him to it, trusting that he’s bound to get himself up when he’s got to go to the bathroom, and you’ll try to intercept him with a toothbrush and a washcloth when he does. Maybe a Twix, for the blood sugar.

There’s no keeping him up if he’s dead set against it, not on an everyday basis. There are heavy sleepers, and then there’s Sleep himself — and maybe someone else could force Hypnos out of that kind of a funk, someone to spark him awake with a sharp nudge, but that kind of thing’s outside Dionysus’s wheelhouse. Dionysus is more the wine side of things than the coffee side; he’s better at pumping the brakes than flooring the gas.

Anyway, you know what you’re getting into with Sleep, it’s right there in the branding: _avoid your problems by not being conscious for them_. Hypnos has probably the universe’s most prominently conflict-avoidant personality type. So, great — that makes two of them.

Fantastic for a relationship until you need to have a serious conversation because one or the other of you ran up the credit card and forgot to mention it (which has been both of them, at different times). It’s fine, though. It’s cool. They stick with debit cards now, and they can only spend money they actually have.

A few times, Dionysus has thought about talking to Thanatos about it — asking him to stop calling Sunday through Thursday — because it’s like clockwork, Thanatos calls one day, (or worse, their spooky mother calls), and guaranteed, Dionysus is going to spend the next day trying to slather fresh deodorant on an unconscious body so the sheets don’t get quite so much of that ripe smell from having a live person in them all day. A whole day, shot. At least if he’d call on a weekend, neither of them would really have any place they needed to be.

One time, Dionysus even wrote up a whole email to him about it. ‘Please don’t call if a weekday’s coming up, or if you call, maybe don’t mention your mom for once,’ stuff like that — a whole list of options presented as sweetly as he could make them. Thanatos can be kind of a defensive type, but like Hypnos, he does kind of respond to a convincing argument if you stick some bullet points in there, so Dionysus had had some hope when he’d drafted it on a 3 am impulse. The bullet points had been _top notch_.

Never sent it, though. That’s the kind of thing you really can’t fuck with — someone else’s family business. There’s no world in which even Hypnos, who’s pretty forgiving, would thank Dionysus for telling his twin that he spirals into a huge funk after every time Thanatos calls him. So — like the champion conflict-avoider that he also is — Dionysus doesn’t bring it up to Thanatos at all.

He lets Hypnos drool on his pillow. (Now, that is _love_ , right?) He turns down the music out in the living room and puts on the good old _Lo-Fi Hip Hop Radio - Beats to Relax/Study To_ , and mostly does his own thing for the day. It always passes after a little while. Sleep’s a cyclical thing, and on the other side of it, Hypnos is always a lot better, though not what you’d call chipper. He usually has this thing, too, where he wants to suck Dionysus’s cock afterward, which, cool, as long as that’s _thank you_ and not _I’m sorry_.

Hypnos doesn’t like talking about it, and neither does Dionysus; ergo, they don’t talk about it. Hypnos has a soft little mouth and a well-tempered gag reflex, and you wouldn’t believe how much cock he can take until Dionysus gets deep enough in his throat to wrench proper delirium-tears out of him and a good, well-earned struggle for breath. “That’s right, baby, like that, you can take it, it’ll feel so much better on the other side,” is all the therapy talk they’re good for — but it works, and Dionysus’ll leave reinventing wheels to Hephaestus and whatever his deal is these days. It’s not so bad, sticking to what works. Dionysus prides himself on being a comfortable landing zone for people he cares about.

Either way, it’s hell on the work week, having a shitty family. Zagreus runs the Underworld now, and he’s hardly going to turf out Hypnos from his job for missing a few shifts, but Hypnos also has this gig at a pharmacy now that he’s proud of, and getting into day-long slumps like this, he’s starting to run through his unscheduled PTO like it’s water.

That’s to say nothing of _Dionysus’s_ family, who are also shitty, and also — not to put too fine a point on it — sucking the life out of him, a little. Hell, at least Hypnos’s workaholic relatives leave him alone, most of the time. They get busy with their crap. Dionysus, on the other hand, is lucky if he can manage not to look at his texts for a whole uninterrupted hour, most days.

It’s the price he’s paid for living local. That’s the first thing Apollo did, once he started taking over work from Helios, was get some _distance_ , like, real distance. He and Artemis were the first to go, the first to give up the mountain top on a full-time basis. 

Ares wasn’t far behind: you can’t keep him where he doesn’t want to be, and living up in the clouds was never his scene. He and Aphrodite left separately, for appearances, and met back up again as soon as they cared to pretend it was coincidence. 

Hermes — does he count? It’s not like he ever spent much continuous _time_ on Olympus, considering what a jackrabbit he is, but he did eventually sort of make the departure official, in that he got himself a _place_ that was earthbound where he started laying his proverbial hat. Dionysus still isn’t sure how many fixed addresses Hermes has at once or how often he changes them, but he’s got a P.O. Box for sending packages to, and as long as you don’t waste his time ( _, Dad_ ), he’s the quickest to answer any text.

Athena, surprisingly, took a long time to go — and oh, it went to shit once she did. Dionysus figures they’re a little similar in their approach to their folks: she’s a classic conflict-avoider too, smooths stuff over, and for her, it’s compounded by the fact that she’s got a bit of an ego about it. See, Athena has this thing where she feels duty-bound to solve anyone’s problem because she thinks no one else has a better chance of fixing it. She took a lot of pride in how much Dad depended on her, right up until the day they got into an argument about _something_ , and then she finally moved out. Wherever Zeus and Hera go, Athena makes sure she always lives halfway around the world from them, just so they can’t call her and ask her to come over.

No, that falls to Dionysus now. He was the dumbass who hung around the longest, _obviously not reading the tea leaves about this_ , and now he’s stuck fielding all Dad and Hera’s drama on the daily. He’d sort of assumed there would still be time for him to change it up — after all, Hephaestus was still there, hammering away, showing no interest in leaving the mountain — but it turns out, Hephaestus doesn’t count. Literally no one, not even Zeus and Hera, wants him as their listening ear.

(No offense meant, because Dionysus considers himself cool with everybody, but Hephaestus is _not_ a conversationalist. He lives up there on the mountain still, he and Aunt Hestia. That sucks for Aunt Hestia, though she has unassailable vibes that even he probably can’t bring down.)

So yeah — Dionysus fucked it. He stayed on the mountain too long, and somehow he found himself the really weird, didn’t-ask-to-be-there-thanks third member of his dad and his stepmom’s relationship, as in, he has to hear about the details so constantly that they might as well hire a sportscaster to give a blow-by-blow to Dionysus personally, at this point. Nearly every day is a challenge, trying to find ways not to play referee or to give out any actual opinions about which one of them was in the wrong about something, or who started it. By the time he finally moved off the mountain ( _for his sanity_ ), it was too late, and about a month later, they moved off the mountain _to follow him_.

Every time he tries a new city, it’s not long before they try it, too.

So every day, it’s some new thing. Dad calling him to cast a tie-breaking vote in some dispute, or to relitigate some past indiscretion to him for two hours straight, wanting hypothetical absolution for his parental imperfections. Hera calling him in tears at 3 am until he feels shitty for how upset she is and agrees to come over. The days when he doesn’t have to leave the house to spend quality time with his parents feel painfully thin on the ground, and he’d really rather be investing his sublime efforts into lifting the spirits of people who ride the wave he provides at least a little farther into shore.

 _This year I won’t talk to them_ , he thinks. _I won’t answer the phone. Maybe next month I’ll start._

He tries, once, for a whole weekend. The voicemails make him feel like genuine shit, though, and he calls back with an excuse about the cat swallowing a chicken bone and having been at the emergency vet overnight without his phone.

Hera chides him to be more careful about bringing his phone with him when he goes out. They were _worried_.

It’s 1:30 in the morning when Dionysus’s phone goes off, and _gods below_ he does not want to look at even one more single text, not when he’s just finished happily taking it out of his boyfriend’s hide for falling asleep 30 minutes before the end of Fellowship of the Ring for the _third time_ this month. (Is Hypnos doing it on purpose? Probably.) Dionysus is still trying to ride his endorphins for as long as they’ll take him before he crashes, and getting a text from his stepmom is a definite brick wall.

Hypnos holds out a sweaty hand, expectant. “I’ve got it,” he says with a smile. “Lady Hera this time, right? We’re pals. Give it over.”

He does that sometimes. When Dionysus is groaning into a pillow, or about to bang his head against a table, or when he thinks he’s about to grow an actual gray hair, Hypnos will sidle up to him with his flashy little grin and hold out a hand for the phone. “Is that Lord Zeus?” he’ll say loud enough for them to hear, like it’s an exciting surprise and not the afternoon’s third phone call. “Let me say hi, I really wanted to hear how things went with the whole date night yesterday!”

It always works, and they usually don’t catch when Hypnos nods off during a particularly lengthy soliloquy. (Dionysus has never gotten any phone or app with video chat enabled, and he never, ever will. He’s got at least the one boundary.) Recently, they’ve started asking Hypnos for his cell phone number, too, so they can start calling him directly. He’s canny, and doesn’t miss the beat with that one. “Oh, there’s no point,” he insists. “I guess I have a cell phone, but I never remember to charge it. It’s dead as a doornail most of the time!”

(No, it isn’t. Dionysus always puts Hypnos’s phone on the charging pad at night if he falls asleep before he remembers to do it. He’d be heartbroken if he forgot to charge his phone and missed a call from his brother.)

 _Lady Hera!!!!!!!!!!!!!_ , Dionysus can see Hypnos typing with about a million exclamation points. _It’s Hypnos obviously!! I stole Dio’s phone because I thought, Lady Hera must have had an awful day if she’s still up when she deserves to be resting!!!!!!!!!!! I was really worried!!! Tell me everything!! :-O :-O :-O :-O_

(The texts Hypnos sends to his own mother are the only ones he sends that aren’t cluttered with excess punctuation and the entire national emoji supply. He types and retypes and retypes them, and unless Dionysus has managed to get a little liquid calm in him beforehand, he’ll usually ask Dionysus to check them over and promise him that the grammar’s perfect. What a waste: she barely ever replies beyond the first message.)

Dionysus rolls over on his side, hooking an arm around Hypnos’s waist and tucking his text-happy boyfriend up against him so he can read over his shoulder. It’s a nice fit, and a familiar one. Hypnos pinches the backs of his toes against Dionysus’s shins and wriggles his freshly beaten, very perfect ass closer. It’s a huge distraction, as is the way Hypnos’s tongue always sticks out of his mouth just a little bit when he’s composing a text. But Dionysus knows he’s shot himself in the foot with this one: there’s absolutely no way to curl up in a bed like this with Hypnos and expect him to still be awake in twenty minutes. He’ll have to take over texting again once Hypnos drops off.

Dionysus kisses the back of Hypnos’s neck, grazing his teeth along the curve of his shoulder until Hypnos twitches, ticklish, and lets out a high giggle.

It’s okay. This is okay.

They’re okay. 

They’ll make up the time later.


End file.
